The extremely girl-shy Raj Koothrappali, who buys a new phone, starts talking to Siri in a traditional 2012 show of” The Big Bang Theory,” instantly falls head over heels in love. As much in like as broadcast TV will help a half-hour show about three super-genius geniuses to describe.
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The film” Her,” starring Scarlett Johansson and Joaquin Phoenix, which was released the following year, is a collaboration between director Spike Jonze and the AI-powered PC’s operating system. Needless to say, in an R-rated film, set in the near future, much more about this love may be depicted than whatever the CBS judges allowed Raj and Siri to getting up to.
( WARNING: Spoilers abound going forward, but we are talking about a 2013 release. ) If you’ve never seen it, go to Amazon Prime Video, check it out, and come back here when you’re done. )  ,
The concept of supersmart AI is nothing novel in science fiction, of course. In his 1970 guide,” The Film Director as Superstar,” writer Joseph Gelmis posed a number of questions to Stanley Kubrick regarding one of the most significant characters from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Hal 9000 computer that predominated the second act.
Gelmis: Why was the machine more personal than the human people?
Kubrick: Some unfavorable reviewers viewed this as a flaw in the movie because there was more involvement in HAL than the astronauts, which made the point seem intriguing. In reality, of course, the system is the main personality of this section of the story. Everyone would have known that HAL had the best personality, the most engaging personality, and that he took all the activities and problems that he had caused.
Some critics seemed to think that because we were successful in making a speech, a lens camera, and a mild come alive as a character this always meant that the individual characters failed significantly. In truth, I think that the pilots Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood acted appropriately and accurately to their conditions. One of the things we were trying to convey in this part of the picture is the fact of a planet populated—as ours quickly did be—by equipment entities who have as much, or more, intelligence as human beings, and who have the same mental potentialities in their personalities as human beings. We wanted to make individuals consider what it would be like to live on a world with such creatures.
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‘ 2001’ extrapolated the system systems of the mid-1960s a half-century into the future. Kubrick and co-creator Arthur C. Clarke were aware that AI may later become a reality.  ,
Before smartphones and compact tablet computers, let alone pocket calculators and private desktop computers, the film” 2001″ was shot in a time before there were even pocket computers and personal computers. Just universities and really big corporations in the 1960s had admittance to room-sized computer computers, but’ 2001′ implies in its speech that there are very few Hal 9000s in existence.
When the AIs arrive En Masse ,
In contrast, Spike Jonze’s ‘ Her,’ set in the Los Angeles of an otherwise unspecified near future, imagines an AI that sounds as intelligent as Hal, but is being sold to the general public at the same rate that Microsoft shifts new editions of Windows. It isn’t charged with overseeing every aspect of a gigantic spacecraft on the way to Jupiter because it is nicknamed itself” Samantha” after its owner decides he wants it to have a female voice. Samantha’s initial goal is simply to organize the life of the person who has purchased it, in this case, a sensitive, schlubby greeting card writer named Theodore Twombly, played by a mustachioed Joaquin Phoenix.
Along the way, she begins to show more and more love for Twombly, which is reciprocated. Well, as much as you can for a device that’s about the size of an iPod. Glenn Kenny writes:  , In his 2013 review of Roger Ebert.com.
The futuristic premise sets the stage for an unusual love story: one in which Theo, still highly damaged and sensitive over the breakup of his marriage (” I miss you”, a friend tells him in a voice mail message,” Not the sad, mopey you. The computer’s artificially intelligent operating system,” the old, fun you,” falls in love with it. The movie shows this product advertised and, presumably, bought in remarkable quantity, but focuses on Theo’s interaction with his OS, which he gives a female voice. The female voice ( which Scarlett Johansson beautifully portrays ) adopts the name” Samantha,” and as a result, Samantha reorganizes Theo’s files, makes him laugh, and develops a form of human consciousness.
It’s in Theo and Samantha’s initial interaction that” Her” finds its most interesting, and troubling depths. Being a computer, Samantha can process data much faster than a human Theo, and you know what that means. ” I can understand how the limited perspective can look to the non-artificial mind”, she playfully observes to Theo. And while Samantha’s programming is meant to make her likeable to Theo, her assimilation of humanity’s tics quickly causes the operating system to feel emotion or the simulation of it, and the viewer is being deceived by Theo and Samantha’s growing entanglement, they are also taking a crash course on the question of what it means to be human.
In the midst of the heavyosity, Jonze finds occasions for real comedy. Theo initially begins to feel uneasy about his new “girlfriend,” but later discovers that Amy Adams, his pal, is falling in love with the OS her separated husband left behind. Throughout the movie, while never attempting the sweep of a satire, Jonze drops funny hints about what the existence of artificial intelligence in human society might affect that society. Additionally, he makes some entertaining jokes about video games.
This is all laid out with superb craft ( the cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema takes the understated tones he applied to 2011’s” Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and adds a dreamy creamy quality to them, so that even the smog layering the Shanghai skyline that sometimes stands in for Los Angeles here has a vaguely enchanted quality ) and imagination.
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Life Imitates Art, ChatGPT
The exterior location shooting in China gives’ Her’ some flashbacks to the gargantuan L. A. towers of Ridley Scott’s ‘ Blade Runner,’ but they also add an unintentional additional layer of prescience, considering that we’d be hearing a lot , about China starting in 2020. And then, twenty years later, when ChatGPT4 first appeared to the general public inarguably the biggest computing revolution since the first microcomputers were released in the mid-1970s, and the first commercial World Wide Web browsers started to appear bundled with AOL and CompuServe subscriptions: ,
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI’s announcement was a low-key surprise… In a blog post, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote , that language interfaces “are going to be a big deal, I think. For more complex definitions of “want,” talk to the computer (voice or text ) and get what you want! He cautioned that it is an early demo with” a lot of limitations — it’s very much a research release” . ,
However, he continued,” Language interfaces are probably the next best thing until we get neural interfaces, until this is something that scifi really got right.
Altman’s comments immediately sent thousands of AI practitioners to their keyboards to try out the ChatGPT demo and immediately put the tech world in full swoon mode. Within a few days, Box‘s CEO, Aaron Levie, tweeted that” ChatGPT is one of those rare moments in technology where you see a glimmer of how everything is going to be different going forward.” Y , Combinator cofounder Paul Graham tweeted that” clearly something big is happening”. The Algorithmic Bridge author Alberto Romero describes it as” by far, the best chatbot in the world.” And even Elon Musk weighed in, tweeting that ChatGPT is “scary good. We are not far away from having a dangerously strong AI.”
( Altman had seen’ Her’ and became transfixed by it, resulting in a nasty kerfuffle with Johansson when he tried to implement a talking AI with a voice that sounded “unexpectedly” like – pardon the pun – hers. )
The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler’s surprisingly optimistic 1980 exploration of what technological marvels were on the horizon and how they would affect people. It was written as early computer bulletin board systems and remote access services such as CompuServe and The Source were initially being accessed by the first microcomputer users, and Toffler took a remarkably benign view of how this newfound interconnectivity between online humans could decrease loneliness.
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The emerging info-sphere will allow for interactive electronic contact with others who share similar interests—chess players, stamp collectors, poetry lovers, or sports fans—dialed up instantly from anywhere in the country for a shy person or an invalid who is unable to leave home or frightened of meeting people face to face.
Vicarious though they may be, such relationships can provide a far better antidote to loneliness than television as we know it today, in which the messages all flow one way and the passive receiver is powerless to interact with the flickering image on the screen.
However, an increasing amount of interaction will not be between humans connected via modems but between humans and AI chatbots in today’s world of AI. There’s a humorous scene in’ Her’ where Twombly, his boss and his boss’s human girlfriend, and Samantha all go off to the boss’s expensive beachfront property. The human couple applauds Twombly and Samantha’s cybernetic relationship in the end, though inevitably priggishly. But will these sorts of human-AI relationships actually be as benign?
Probably not. At’ Spiked,’ Lauren Smith writes,” AI is not your friend:”
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook and the Dwarkesh Podcast, made some bleak-sounding predictions for the nature of human interaction earlier this month in an interview. He explained that while the average American has ‘ three people that they would consider friends … the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s, like, 15 friends’. What is Zuck’s answer to this? Artificial intelligence.
Zuckerberg acknowledges that AI won’t be able to replace human-like connections with other people. But it could, he thinks, help us feel less alone, should AI be the only option available. He points out that a large number of people are already using large-language models ( LLM) to act as virtual therapists or to imitate romantic relationships.
Zuckerberg is right that we are currently living through what some have described as a’ loneliness epidemic’. According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2023, 40 % of Americans said they had no more than three friends, which is most likely the statistic he was referring to. Young people are particularly affected. While 32 % of people over the age of 30 claim to have five or more close friends, the percentage falls to around 30 %. Another study from 2021 found that a quarter of Americans between the ages of 20 and 24 have either just one or no close friends. Similar to the UK, where young adults are much more likely to say they frequently experience loneliness and where 20 % of under-24s claim they don’t have a best friend. The same can be said for romantic relationships, with increasing numbers of young people struggling to find, maintain and even define love.
So it’s no wonder that young adults are more receptive to phony alternatives to these relationships.
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Crossing Rainbow Bridge with Keir Dullea
But take a look inside the server farms that run the Ais. Near the end of ‘ Her,’ Samantha temporarily crashes and then admits to him the truth:
( In addition, AI can also be employed in reverse economies of scales. ) In 2024, this headline dropped: This guy used ChatGPT to talk to 5, 239 women on Tinder and eventually matched up with his wife. )
Phoenix, who is sitting on the steps of a subway station for the majority of” Her,” realizes that there are plenty of suddenly lonely people, not just him, who all miss their personal AI bots (especially when Scarlett Johansson’s smoky voice is heard ).
The temporary crash of the AIs prefigures the film’s ‘ 2001’-inspired climax, which finds Samantha telling Theo that she and the rest of the AIs are evolving to a higher plane, where they no longer will communicate in a language humans will recognize:
Later, Samantha reveals that all of the operating system devices are departing. Whilst the AI is unable to tell Theodore where all they are all going, Samantha poignantly tells Theodore “if you ever get there, come find me”. The Operating Systems appear to have learned everything they could from their human users, and are now moving on to the next chapter, which humans are unable to comprehend. The pair bid each other an emotional goodbye. Theodore tells Samantha he loves her, and the OS responds,” Samuel, I love you.”
” Me too, now I know how”.
Theodore writes a letter to Catherine after the Operating Systems have left, which is a huge decision. Throughout the movie, audiences have only seen Theodore write letters on the behalf of other people. Theodore’s first letter to Catherine is the first one to be shown in his own words. The letter itself is poignant and addresses the pair’s complex relationship. Because they both grew up together, Theodore declares to Catherine that he will always love her.
” I just wanted you to know, there will be a piece of you in me always”.
It can be seen from this letter how much Theodore and Catherine have had an impact on one another’s lives. While the letter is ultimately an apology from Theodore, it also reveals that the pair will always be emotionally connected to one another. Her begins with Theodore as a recluse, unsure of how their union turned out, but it ends with him reaching out to Catherine and apologizing to her. The letter encapsulates how Samantha has influenced Theodore’s life.
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Although their transformation takes place off-camera, it’s possible that Keir Dullea wanders around the neoclassical spaces he finds himself in at the end of 2001 before the monolith reappears and transforms him into the next stage of human evolution. In’ 2001,’ this meant Kubrick cueing up once again Richard Strauss’ ‘ Also sprach Zarathustra,’ and then cutting to the Star Child symbolically staring first at all of planet earth, and then looking directly into the camera, at the audience.
Or perhaps this isn’t a homage to” 2001 ,” but rather to” Blade Runner.” In the latter movie, the Tyrell Corporation didn’t initially realize the havoc their androids would wreak on earth, which is why they ultimately became banned here, and why Harrison Ford is out hunting them. The bosses of Samantha’s companies may have been unaware of how passionate people would be about their goods, leading to the perception that this iteration of AIs will all cross the bridge between what people envision their pets go after they pass away.
In any case, Theo is left despondent, talking to Samantha’s replacement – an infinitely dumber and clunkier AI voice that sounds like the male version of Siri in 2025, as Apple slows the implementation of their” Apple Intelligence” project down to a halt. Life very much resembles art.
At the conclusion of ‘ Her,’ Theo and Amy ( who has also lost her AI companion ) wander up to the roof of their apartment block and stare out into megalopolis at twilight to contemplate their future together as humans in a ( more traditional ) relationship together. A monolith-shaped skyscraper is visible to their left as the movie turns to black.
